Rest stops are central to countrywide infrastructure. Rest stops have been built over many years at regular intervals along interstate highways. The purpose of these rest stops is to allow both passenger vehicles and trucks to take breaks as needed between the start of their travel and their destination.
Often rest stops typically have a separate parking area for commercial truck traffic. The parking needs of truck drivers is sometimes more stringent than the average motorist. Truck drivers are on a schedule to deliver their cargo. Federal requirements require truck drivers to take rests at regular intervals. Therefore, truck drivers would benefit from some insurance that a parking space is available at rest stops along their journey. Thus, a system to provide occupancy information for upcoming rest stops would allow truckers to better plan their schedule.
Prior art approaches mainly rely on manual counting. However, such a solution is impractical and inefficient. There are computer vision algorithms that can detect the presence or absence of a car or truck. These algorithms continue to improve, but all have some level of error where the algorithm will indicate a truck is present when one is not (false positive) or that no truck is present when one is (false negative). Therefore prior art attempts to count parking lot occupancy inherently include an error in the total occupancy and are not adequate to provide an occupancy count. Prior art in ground detection systems are similarly flawed. It is not uncommon for such prior art systems to inaccurately count the presence of a vehicle in a parking spot, also giving an error in the total occupancy. Prior art in ingress and egress systems are similarly flawed. It is not uncommon for such prior art systems to count single vehicles as multiple vehicles or count multiple vehicles as single vehicles, resulting in errors that compound as time increases.
Accordingly, a need in the art exists for improved systems and methods for accurately counting the vehicle occupancy of a facility as described herein.